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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26245291">The Bitten Mouth</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers'>Zabbers</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Barbs, Blood, Blow Torches, Bugs, Electricity, F/M, Healing/Repair, Hurt/Comfort, Kissing, in which it is the Master's own fault he gets hurt, masterversary, oh needles I forgot to tag that the barbs are needle-like, someone's been stocking the Doctor's first aid kit with Bob the Builder plasters for her, the TARDIS is in the shop again</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 13:08:35</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,306</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26245291</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The Master gets hurt helping the Doctor with TARDIS maintenance.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>48</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Masterversary Mini Event 2020-21</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Bitten Mouth</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He puts his coat up on a peg inside the entrance to the garage. The boxy space trades sun for shadow, the heat of late afternoon for the heat of shop tools: the Doctor’s got a blow torch going full-blast in her hand, the stringy nap of her rough leather gauntlet singeing under the unwavering flame. Her TARDIS, up on car risers, looks nervous and uncomfortable.</p><p>“Need a hand?” he asks. He’s already rolling up his sleeves, unbuttoning cuffs, folding fabric back over itself to his elbows.</p><p>She turns to look at him. Her eyes are hidden behind tinted goggles, but he sees the pause, the stillness of her head as she processes his presence. She turns back to the underside of the TARDIS.</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“I’ll give you one anyway: I’m at loose ends.”</p><p>She doesn’t set the blow torch on him, which he takes for temporary acquiescence. The Master moves in next to her; once he adopts her perspective, he can see what she’s working on. He stretches up to pry a loose metallic scale like a scab or a barnacle from the woodform bottom. Wirelike tendrils wriggle on the inner surface before retreating into the material. </p><p>“Pleasant,” he says, before slipping it into the covered bucket she’s half-filled with the others. They clatter, and maybe skitter, under the lid.</p><p>The Doctor aims her flame at the next spot. “How did you get here?”</p><p>“Does it matter?”</p><p>The sound as she applies the heat is high-pitched, a fingers-on-chalkboard squeal the length of a very tall chalkboard and unusually durable fingernails. “I don’t care.”</p><p>“I didn’t think so.”</p><p>The scab glows, shivers, and gives up its airtight hold on the TARDIS with a sucking pop. They wait while it cools, the metal calming from flushed, internal red to a mere surface shimmer. The Master picks it. Into the bucket, hot potato.</p><p>“You’ll get blisters doing that.”</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>“There’s spare gloves in a box on that bench.”</p><p>The Master shakes his head. He touches the tips of his fingers and thumb together. They feel rougher, sensitive already. He’s thin-skinned.</p><p>“Suit yourself.”</p><p>They clear a lot of barnacles from the TARDIS’ surface without speaking. There’s a rhythm, and once they find it, the Master pushes it. There’s the narrow, rushing roar of the torch, on and then off; the ticking of heated metal, irregular though not unpredictable, while they wait; then reaching up, rocking on his tiptoes, the thing not quite inert in his hand, the clink in the bucket and the clank of the lid. Each time a little sooner, each burn a little hotter. </p><p>Too hot. The Master hisses.</p><p>The creature drops onto the concrete and immediately generates a carpet of legs. The Doctor exclaims, stamps on it and then shifts all her weight onto that foot.</p><p>“You’re some help,” she says, grimacing. “You’ll have to get down there and pick it up.”</p><p>There’s no alternative option, except to leave her stood on the insect thing forever, not a good one right now. Reluctantly, he lowers himself to the floor, his eyes on her boot, avoiding her face until the last minute, when he raises his eyes to hers. </p><p>“I’m ready. Let go.”</p><p>The Doctor lifts her foot and the metallopede immediately makes a run for it. The Master snatches it up before it can get away into the cluttered shadows. It extends its copious legs into a hundred thready vines, wrapping them around his fingers. He feels them pierce his skin, more than just pinpricks.</p><p>“Great,” the Doctor mutters. “The one time you won’t wear gloves.”</p><p>The Master tightens his jaw, jerks his head, once.</p><p>“Hang on, hang on, hang on a mo,” she says, bustling off with the torch to turn the gas off.</p><p>“Hurry...up.”</p><p>“You’ll be all right one minute.”</p><p>He closes his eyes and breathes through the narrow space between top and bottom teeth. The creature colonising his hand writhes, putting out feelers, and he hunches over it, curling himself around it in a parody of protection because he doesn’t want to wind up rooted to the Doctor’s workshop, with its Earth radio maddeningly just-audible in the background and with the breezily wafting road fumes and the grease on his tongue and the pegboard on the walls, grinding around and around the back end of nowhere again. </p><p>“Here we go,” the Doctor says, and drops down next to him just long enough to clamp something to the vegetal mass, a matching something to his other hand. It’s toothed and too tight, biting into the webbing between thumb and forefinger. She darts away again before the significance of it sinks in.</p><p>The electric surge grabs him and shakes him and shakes him and spits him out. </p><p>He’s slack and sprawled, dribbling and loose-limbed, closer to the floor than before. The Doctor’s shout of triumph as she snags the creature and traps it in the bucket with the others cuts through the buzzing fog. </p><p>The Master groans. It’s wet under his cheek.</p><p>“There must have been a better way,” he complains when he can speak again. His tongue doesn’t entirely work right.</p><p>“Nope.”</p><p>He inspects his hand; he blinks at it. It’s rubbery. It’s taking a lot of effort to move, a lot of concentration to grasp the alligator clamp and detach it. “I’m bleeding! I’ve been ravaged.”</p><p>The Doctor sighs and walks off, but in place of the expected flush of torch reignition, there’s the noise of something rattling in a metal tin. She sets the tin down in front of his face before flipping the lid open on its hinge. It’s shiny bright red, a first aid kit.</p><p>“Let’s see it,” she says.</p><p>He’s amazed she’s holding her hand out for his, and disbelieving too. He’s consequently slow to react, and he can see she’s about to pull her goggles down from where she’s set them over the mess of fine hair on her forehead, almost ready to turn away.</p><p>He reaches for her before she does.</p><p>The first aid kit is better stocked than expected, though all the plasters in it have cartoons on them. The Doctor wets his hand down with most of a bottle of Dettol spray. It runs with his blood along the lines of his palm, aromatic and cold.</p><p>“Is there a lolly in there, too,” he jokes, “if I’m a good boy?”</p><p>“You were never a good boy.” </p><p>“Or a good girl?”</p><p>She lifts his hand and brings her face down close to it, bending his fingers back to get a good look at the top of the palm. “I think there’s some residue stuck in there needs removed.”</p><p>They peer at it together. Now the blood is mostly clear, they can see he’s swollen with bits of little legs. He swallows.</p><p>“I’ve got tweezers I can try with first,” she offers. Her voice is skeptical. </p><p>He isn’t happy about it either. “All right. Yes. Fine.” He sits up slowly onto his knees. </p><p>But the tweezers don’t accomplish very much. The tendrils snap when she tries to tug them out of him. She gets a good hold on one at last, and grabs it to its deep root, bringing up with it more blood: the Master winces. Inside the droplet, it’s got a pronged end, unforgiving with vicious little barbs. As they watch, it grows twice as long and then ten times as barbed, questing for an anchorage. </p><p>The Doctor frowns with concern. </p><p>“We know heat works,” the Master says very softly. Then, almost a singsong: “Have you got a brûlée torch?”</p><p>It hurts. </p><p>Red-hot needles generally do, and these move in his flesh as they struggle against the attack until they ooze and drop out reluctantly a few at a time with the orange waxlike translucence of the molten. It takes a lot of heating to get them there. It forces the Doctor into grim patience with the soldering iron, and when his body jerks itself from the torment, the Master into clamping himself to a workbench, his bare forearm in a vise. </p><p>He nearly wrenches his shoulder out of its socket, chagrined at his inability to suppress his reaction to pain, but vacillating also into the urge to go with it, to open up his mouth and scream it out and kick and pound and let this little world feel his hearts race. </p><p>The Doctor puts her hand on his inner elbow and squeezes her fingers. <em>Steady, old chap.</em> </p><p><em>Steady.</em> </p><p>His hand’s a mess by the time they're sure they've extracted every last bit of metal, the Doctor poking about in the pulp with her pinching sharp tweezers to triple and quadruple check. He stares at it like it isn't real, like it isn't really his hand in hers, getting mangled. </p><p>She makes apologetic sounds as she works, grinding a rage into him that he tamps down again and again until it’s little more than a pilot light under packed fuel.</p><p>When she finally stops, satisfied, he frees himself carefully, ginger with his shoulder. “I don’t think we can fix this with Bob the Builder,” he remarks. The quip comes off lighter than he'd thought he could manage. </p><p>“Yes we can.”</p><p>A sterile pad on a bit of stretchy adhesive simply isn't going to work with no clear skin to stick to, but she brings out of the red tin rather than a colourful plaster a rolled bandage, and beginning at his wrist she unravels it, wrapping it around him in tight criss-crosses, winding lines. As soon as it touches the pad of his palm the red seeps through, darkening the pattern of the weave. </p><p>She makes the binding tight, leaving his thumb and fingers free; he can feel his pulses against its constriction, lulling him. Holding him, she allows him to feel hers as well, cradled around his knuckles, threading through his fingers. It’s better than any balm, though today, these days, this isn’t a thing they can admit to. And nor is it a thing he wants. </p><p>Nevertheless, the anger and the need to feel it fade for a moment. Is this why he came, to probe the hurt, to push his tongue against the tooth, and in needling the sour spot, soothe it? He’s always seeking the roar of pain and the wet white noise of its aftermath, blind and obliterating. </p><p>“Kiss it better,” he demands.</p><p>The Doctor crinkles her forehead, her whole mouth scrunching sideways. “Really?”</p><p>“Aren’t you interested in that sort of thing anymore?”</p><p>“I don’t know. But it’s not that.” She pauses. “I didn’t think you’d want to be contaminated.”</p><p>This makes the Master laugh. “I’m already <em>contaminated</em>. Already compromised beyond anything your touch could do to me. It’s only your skin. Your mouth. Be profane—match it up to what’s in my core.”</p><p>She looks down at his hand. She’s dressed the wound to match a memory, and in the memory someone leans over the bandaged palm, someone presses her lips to its cool hollow, so distant now it might not have been a memory, or a real person, but a shared dream, something they wanted that couldn’t be had. </p><p>“Do you regret trying to be friends again?” the Doctor asks.</p><p>“Never.” With his vehemence the Master surprises himself. “But I regret what you are, and I regret what that makes me.”</p><p>“I think I might,” she admits dully, “regret.”</p><p>He blinks. “Yes, I know.”</p><p>She drops his hand and lets him go. He lifts it to her head instead and brushes it against her hair, resting across the tight line of the strap of her goggles. There’s a part of him that hopes he’ll stain her, his blood marking her through the useless gauze. Though his grasp of a soft lock is gentle—the hair’s a bright illusion, as it slides through his fingers, of something brighter than blood between the shadows of his skin—the urge to grab it and pull on it, to yank her head to the side until she screeches, fills him. </p><p>He has a compulsion to make her react. </p><p>Something in his face or a twitch of his hand gives him away. She claps her fingers around his wrist, and when he resists her, she hardly pauses before she presses her thumb into his palm. Fresh blood drips down his wrist, warm rivulet like the ink on a promise or the seal on a pact. </p><p>He sneers; she snarls; he grins: <em>this</em> is more like it. </p><p>They struggle without either giving a centimetre. Then they slip, disengage, drive into each other again. All her careful work, undone. His broken flesh exposed, he smashes it against her face, smearing her cheek and her lip and her teeth, tearing himself against her sharp edges. </p><p>And now, she grins too, or maybe she’s baring her teeth. But as they stand off, staring, she softens her lips over them and presses her mouth to his hand. The lightness of her touch is like a brand. Her eyes are keenly triumphant.</p><p>“All better?” she asks. Her breath is fast and her teeth are showing. He’s dripping fat splatters onto the concrete floor.</p><p>“What an excellent nurse you make, dear.”</p><p>The Master relaxes his upraised arm experimentally. The Doctor follows suit, and by increments they pull back, until the knot of their bodies is loose enough for the Master to bend his neck and lean in in a kind of acknowledging, mocking bow. She comes forward too, in an answer that isn’t ever an answer: does she regret, does she care, does it matter, is this better?</p><p>Her lips and teeth are slick. It’s the mineral tang of his own blood, as thick and familiar as if it were dripping down the back of his throat, not hers, that he can taste inside her mouth.</p>
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